The good news is the day is fast approaching where you will be able to be chauffeured in comfort in your very own driver-less car. It will pick up the kids from school, take you to the airport and put taxi drivers out of work. Technology continues to advance and to make our lives easier but there is always a cost.

A pedestrian crosses in front of a vehicle as part of a demonstration at Mcity on its opening day. Photo / AP

Automakers and researchers say a new simulated city at the University of Michigan could help speed the development of driverless and connected cars.

…The site has many familiar features of urban driving, including intersections, a railroad crossing, two roundabouts, brick and gravel roads and parking spaces. Moveable building facades and fake pedestrians can be altered for different kinds of tests. There’s a simulated highway entrance ramp. Two features ” a metal bridge and a tunnel ” will be a special challenge for wireless signals and radar sensors.

…Eustice says the site allows researchers to be “maximally evil” toward the car, putting it into all sorts of situations that can be quickly and easily repeated, like a model of a pedestrian obscured by a bus that walks out into traffic. Every kilometer of testing at the site is worth hundreds of kilometers of real-world driving, he said, since it can take hours of real driving to come upon a scenario that’s difficult for the car to handle.

That our future lies in enabling technologies not restrictive technologies.

Trains are constrained by tracks and are not at all versatile, whereas driverless vehicles are enabling in many, many ways.

The prospect of cars travelling New Zealand highways with no one behind the wheel is moving closer says new Transport Minister Simon Bridges. Officials are reviewing legislation allowing for the testing of umanned autonomous vehicles on public roads.

Mr Bridges has pledged to work with environmental interests while also pursuing the Government’s road building programme.

Mr Bridges said he was committed to “a balanced approach” and ongoing investment roads were important even from a green perspective, “over time as we move to electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles”.

Mr Bridges said the Government was not doing a great deal to accommodate autonomous vehicle technology, “but I don’t think there’s any doubt that if you look at what’s going on internationally, maybe not in the next couple of years, but over time we will see driverless vehicles and that will have implications, like for example less congestion because vehicles can travel closer together”.

In the UK David Cameron is copping a flogging for pouring billions into a high-speed rail solution that only rich pricks are going to be able to use. Anyone who suggests rail is the solution of the future transport issues should be taken out the back of the bike sheds and given a sound thrashing. Driverless cars are the way of the future.

Anybody who still believes high-speed rail is the answer to our transport problems, rather than an unaffordably grandiose throwback to a bygone era, needs to take a trip to Silicon Valley.

Some of the world’s cleverest scientists and engineers, including those at Google, are pioneering a new generation of driverless cars that will change our lives as much as the internet has already done.

David Cameron likes to think that he is making Britain more like California but his embrace of the £35bn taxpayer-financed HS2 project linking London to the Midlands and the North is, in fact, shockingly outdated, making him sound more like a French bureaucrat desperate to build monuments to himself than an enabler of US-style disruptive entrepreneurship. Read more »

Any long term reader nows I detest rail, especially in Auckland. There isn’t a metropolitan rail service anywhere that makes money…they are all heavily subsidised. Cities like Auckland with negligible rail corridor, built on an isthmus and geographically spread are never going to solve transport problems with rail.

Of course you will get the train spotters who always claim that roads are subsidised too…if we could only divert all the money of roads to rail and then get buses to connect…missing the point that buses need roads that they just committed to not spending on.

[T[he more developed a country becomes, the more expensive and time-consuming any new rail line will be. And if you’re looking out say 20 years, there’s a pretty strong case to be made that the kind of efficiency that we can get today only on rail lines will in future be available on roads as well — with significantly greater comfort and convenience for passengers.

Right now, technology is arguably making roads and cars more dangerous. Drivers are notoriously bad judges of their own driving ability, and they’re increasingly being distracted by devices — not just text messages, any more, but fully-fledged emails, social-media alerts, and even videos. What’s more, when car manufacturers roll out things like stay-in-lane technology, that just makes drivers feel even safer, so they feel as though they have some kind of permission to spend even more time on their phones, and less time paying attention to the highway. The results can be disastrous. Read more »

Steve Mahan is 95 percent blind. And yet he was able to get into a car and drive a pre-programmed route from his California home to a Taco Bell restaurant. Mahan was driving a Google autonomous car. For people like Mahan, who are visually impaired, this technology is liberating in a pretty fundamental way. It gives him the freedom of mobility, and the ability to be independent. While it will take a few more years for these vehicles to be widely available to the public, the video [above] gives us a glimpse of what the future will be like.

Why drive to a train station, park, pay for a ticket, wait, hop on a train, sit for a while, then hop back in a car or other train when you get close to your destination, when you can just take a nap while your self-driving car carries you safely—and directly—to your destination?

Len Brown and other public transport adherents need to get out more. But Len already knows this…he hardly ever takes the train, preferring the convenience of his car.

Right now, you may wind up sitting at a red light for 45 seconds even though no one is passing through the green light in the opposite direction. But you don’t have to do that in a world where traffic flows according to computer communication instead of the systems that have been built with human behavior in mind. … Because of this, we won’t need traffic lights at all (or stop signs, for that matter). Traffic will constantly flow, and at a rate that would probably unnerve the average human driver.

Instead of focusing on large cost public transport infrastructure projects we should instead be focusing on providing the data networks and roading structures that would support a huge fleet of driverless cars.

Instead of driving being dead time for the driver you would instead be able to complete tasks otherwise taken up with driving. For me it would mean being able to publish a post about something I just heard on the radio, or saw as I drove by.

IT WILL be some years before cars are as smart as KITT, the talking, self-piloting car in the 1980s TV show “Knight Rider”. Several carmakers, and Google, are doing trials of self-driving cars, and Nevada has become the first American state to pass a law to regulate such trials on public roads.

Already, however, cars are increasingly coming with features that help drivers with steering and braking and, in some cases, overrule their human operators to prevent crashes. This week Ford’s chairman, Bill Ford, said carmakers needed to press ahead with autonomous vehicles. He is convinced that they will ease traffic jams. And the same sorts of automation that can squeeze more cars on to the roads can also cut accidents (themselves a big cause of congestion).

Volvo’s new V40 small hatchback essentially drives itself in busy traffic, maintaining a safe distance and keeping in lane without human intervention. The V40 also brakes automatically when it senses an imminent collision, as can Ford’s new B-Max minivan. Such features appeared on some pricey vehicles a few years ago, but are now arriving on much cheaper models. Nissan is working on software that anticipates a driver’s next move—for instance, adjusting the speed and position of the car going into a turn. This summer America’s traffic-safety agency will put 3,000 test cars on Michigan’s roads equipped with a variety of such “driver-assist” features.

When ever you ask people about public transport usualy their eyes glaze over as they dream of some expensive pipe dream for “other people” to take. I am yet to find an advocate for public transport that actually uses it as their primary mode of transport.

Len Brown needs to be showing the way too. He has pledged to almost $5 billion of other peoples money funding rail as the solution to all our ills. Getting ratepayers of Auckland to subsidise international travelers for their trips to and from the airport and the city. If Len Brown is a serious rail advocate he should use the train to get to work in his new mayoral office. If it is good enough for “other people” it should be good enough for Len Brown.

Advancing the digital economy is a far better way of growing this city that spending nearly $5 billion on 19th century technology rail projects. Technology can deliver where socialists and green freaks have failed with the expansion of rail.

My ideal for public transport, shamelessly stolen from Peter Cresswell over a beer at Blogger’s Drinks, is for there to be a system of public transportation “pods”. You stand on the street and one arrives in front of you, you get in it and command the “pod” to travel to your destination and you get there get out. You repeat this as often as you desire to get around the city.

We have a version of this already, the “pods” are called cars, there are even ones you can command, they are called taxis. A logical extension of this though would be to remove the driver altogether and control the cars remotely using technology. Fanciful stuff you say, but wait, its already being done.

Google’s (GOOG) dramatic experiments on California roads with driverless-vehicle technology, publicized with mild fanfare within the past week, could legitimize a once far-fetched concept for personal transportation.

The general public hasn’t closely followed breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and digital control systems as they apply to so-called autonomous vehicles. But the military’s drone aircraft, which can take off, land and carry out military missions by remote control may provide some hints as to how far driverless cars can go. Achievements in the automotive realm have been made partly by university scientists who receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Defense’s research and development arm, DARPA, as well as by automakers.

Thanks to the the financial resources and creativity of Google, driverless technology is moving toward mass-market application sooner than anyone predicted, in the same manner that Internet technology migrated from university laboratories to personal computers once it was embraced by companies like Aol (AOL).

Well, lookee there, exactly as I (and Peter Cresswell) have wished. This is public transport I can believe in. useful, convenient and takes me where I want to go not where some green freak thinks I want to go.

The increases in safety on the roads from such a system would be enormous.

What Google brings to the table is an outsider’s perspective and an understanding of tech-savvy consumers. Automakers have long known that cars could be built to drive themselves, but have been cautious about overselling the idea to the public or predicting their imminent arrival. In the meantime, automakers have developed a raft of features to mitigate driver distraction, which ultimately could be used to take driving out of human hands.

“The industry knows the long road that has to be traveled to make driverless technology successful,” said Tom Kowaleski, a spokesman for BMW’s U.S. operations.

Safety and litigation worries by the industry have previously slowed the introduction of features now considered basic, such as airbags. Conventional wisdom has held that no machine could process as much information as a driver or react as well – but the time may have finally come where perhaps the opposite is true. “Every new piece of technology we introduce takes three to five years of gestation before it can be introduced. I have no crystal ball,” Kowaleski said.

While Google’s latest experimental vehicle uses sensors to see its surroundings and respond appropriately, BMW, Toyota and other automakers have been experimenting with a different kind of technology: Their experiments revolve around communication systems that allow cars to exchange wireless signals. A car that encounters a slippery road, for example, could inform others approaching the area, Kowaleski said. In an early stage of the technology, the driver could respond to a warning; eventually cars could be taught to respond on their own by slowing down or engaging all wheel drive or some other feature.

Toyota was the first automaker to offer a feature that allowed a driver to overcome the difficulty of parallel parking by letting the car do so on its own. John Hanson, a Toyota spokesman, said in an emailed message that the automaker has been working on autonomous vehicles and related technologies and “will be a leader” when such vehicles are introduced.

Imagine if we were so bold as to remove the trains, lay asphalt instead and now create rapid transit lanes for use by autonomous vehicles. Wow that would be spectacular, and as more autonomous vehicles became available we could then start dedicating lane on the motorway to them too. The future for public transport as convenient, ubiquitous and available seems to be not far away.

Beyond the technological hurdles, which seem less difficult to surmount as companies like Google weigh in, automakers may have to consider a different model for personal transportation once a human driver is no longer essential. Here’s where the technology might both empower consumers and startle car makers.

Cars that don’t need drivers also may not need private owners – since they could be summoned remotely and returned once their journey is complete. Why take on a lease if you can purchase a subscription to a car instead? Netflix (NFLX) has already soundly proven that consumers will change their habits if enough of an incentive is provided. Car owners who never want to spend a Saturday under the hood or in the waiting room of a mechanic’s shop again might quickly adapt to a car subscription model.

With Google’s driverless leap forward, both in terms of technology and in presentation to an increasingly tech-savvy and tech-obsessed world, the joys of car driving and car ownership may give way to the convenience of forgoing the gasoline pump — or the charging station — for good.

I think Len Brown would be better off in talking to Google and Toyota about such a system for Auckland and investing in this rather than his dream (nightmare) of spending nearly $5 billion on outmoded, static, hopeless transport systems.

Humans are creative and adaptable creatures, we can solve our transport crisis with technology, and it isn’t by building rail networks.